Recentering Democracy around Citizens:A multimedia report on how local leaders, and the national associations that serve them, can react to pressing challenges and reshape local governance

The skills, attitudes, capacity, and diversity of ordinary people are creating new opportunities and new challenges for our communities and our democracy. More than ever, citizens are able to disrupt policymaking processes when they don’t understand or agree with the values and opinions of decision-makers. Citizens are able to contribute more than ever to public problem-solving. And it is clearer than ever that the quality of civic engagement is a critical factor in the economic vitality of that community.

Forty leaders, including a diverse array of public managers, academic researchers, democracy practitioners, and funders, met at the McCormick Foundation’s Cantigny Conference Center in February 2010 to discuss these changes in citizenship and local governance, and to explore possibilities for collaboration in democracy reform. The group included members and staffers from nine national associations that represent and convene local leaders: the National League of Cities, the International City/County Management Association, the League of Women Voters of the USA, the National School Public Relations Association, the United Way, Grassroots Grantmakers, the National Physicians Alliance, the United Neighborhood Centers of America, and the American Planning Association.

Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, which convened the meeting, illustrated the state of local democracy with an offbeat 5-minute ‘home movie’:

[Press CTRL and click on picture to watch short movie]

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Pictures from a (r)evolution: How the associations see the challenges

The “Recentering Democracy” participants prepared for the meeting by reading five documents describing different aspects of the state of local democratic governance: Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities , by

Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung, asks why sustaining this work is so difficult, describes several communities that seem to have ‘embedded’ large-scale deliberation in local politics, and lists several conditions that must be present for it to happen.

The Promise and Challenge of Neighborhood Democracy , by Matt Leighninger, examines the lessons learned from longstanding neighborhood governance systems, building on a meeting of local officials, academic researchers, neighborhood leaders, and city employees who work with neighborhoods.

A set of slides on the Knight Foundation’s “Soul of the Community” research project (see p. 9 below).

Promising Practices in Online Engagement , written by Alison Kadlec, Scott Bittle and Chris Haller of Public Agenda’s Center for Advancements in Public Engagement, examines “how the Internet might help build capacity and momentum for inclusive, collaborative and boundary-crossing problem solving at all levels of public life.”

Ten Lessons for Talking about   Racial Equity in the Age of Obama , a publication of the Opportunity Agenda, describes how discussions of race can play out within discussions about how to revitalize democracy.

The representatives of the national associations also brought their own extensive expertise with local democracy to the meeting. Some of these representatives were staffers operating out of the association’s headquarters; others were local leaders who are particularly active members. (For example, Karen Kleinz is the associate director of the National School Public Relations Association; Ron Koehler is an assistant superintendent of schools in Kent County, Michigan, and NSPRA’s incoming president).

Before the meeting, the associations provided statements about why “recentering democracy” was a compelling topic for their members:

Bonnie Mann and Chris Hoene, National League of Cities: “Making democracy work and making government work have been core values and central tasks of the National League of Cities (NLC) since its founding in 1924.  NLC is carrying out work to assist cities and city officials on a range of topic areas such as city fiscal conditions, economic

development and regional economics, sustainability, housing and immigrant integration. Questions of engaging citizens on issues and creating effective public deliberation arise in all these areas. Through its work on ‘Democratic Governance,’ NLC seeks greater understanding about how local leaders are mobilizing to more

Chris Hoene Bonnie Mann

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effectively engage citizens/residents to make decisions, overcome conflicts, and solve critical public problems.”

Cheryl Graeve, League of Women Voters of the USA: “Throughout 90 years of history of the League of Women Voters, has played a ‘trusted convener role’ and helped to build bridges between citizens and government at local, state, national and international levels. Today, as we face many significant challenges, we also are seeing an alarming rise in the distrust in government and dissatisfaction of citizens who feel their voices and interests are taking a back seat to the interests of those with the most money or political clout. Our nation urgently needs collaboration and reduction of partisan bickering – it needs civil, citizen based discourse, in order to move forward in rebuilding public trust and advancing important solutions to our challenges. The League is interested in this ‘Recentering Democracy’ conference because we hope it will help advance the important voice of the citizen in our decision making processes.”

Janis Foster Richardson, Grassroots Grantmakers: “Grassroots Grantmakers is a network of place-based funders in the United States and Canada who are working from a

‘we begin with residents’ perspective – supporting active citizenship to build social capital, civic capacity and community resilience among residents at the block level in their communities.  We serve as a locus of learning about grassroots grantmaking and as an advocate for the practice of grassroots grantmaking as an essential component of effective place-based philanthropy.  We believe that place-based change and community resilience cannot be accomplished without the full engagement of all people who live in that place.  We are essentially about ‘recentering place-based philanthropy’ –

bringing residents more fully into the picture in their active citizen roles – and thus closely identify with the broader ‘recentering democracy’ discussion.”

Ian Bautista, United Neighborhood Centers of America: “Before the turn of the last century, what it meant to be a ‘citizen’ was vastly different than what we understand in the term today. At the time that Jane Addams, Stanton Coit, Lillian Wald, Robert Woods, and other pioneers of our movement were establishing their settlement houses in places like New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere, many of these visionaries could not vote – a basic tenet of what we believe is central to ‘citizenship.’ United Neighborhood Centers of America, because of the legacy of our movement and founders, but moreso because of contemporary commitment to our mission, ‘. . . building neighborhoods with neighbors . . .’ is leading a return to fostering democracy at the neighborhood level inclusively among all of our neighbors, be they native-born or new Americans, young or old, men, women or transgendered, poor or wealthy, functionally illiterate or well-

Cheryl Graeve

Janis Foster Richardson

Ian Bautista

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educated. Our organization and its members, in some cases for over 100 years, have been the place where democracy has been taught and practiced in many urban neighborhoods. In heated debates and discussions in dining halls, English classes, lectures, child care classrooms, public forums, and other physical and social spaces, UNCA’s members have been a welcoming and essential instrument of democracy and advocate for and with the citizens who practice it. Now, more than ever, neighborhood centers and other community-building nonprofit institutions in our network must rise to the call of leadership to embrace our heritage by remembering and actively embracing our duty to teach and foster democracy. Some of our members do this extremely well, while others are re-learning essential democratic ingredients and principles. We are proud to be part of this convening and other similar discussions. We look forward to learning from others and also offering up the lessons from the voices of our cherished and highly diverse neighbors.”

Mike Wood, United Way Worldwide: “For more than 120 years, the United Way has existed to improve lives. We do this by mobilizing the caring power of communities to

advance the common good in education, income, and health – the building blocks of a good life for all. United Way understands that the nation’s most pervasive challenges cannot be solved by any single institution, nor can institutions alone solve community problems. Social change is only created when individuals, driven by their aspirations, come together to address causes larger than themselves. Organizations like United Way can play an important role in catalyzing those efforts and being part of the solution – as a convener and a mobilizer of financial and other resources. But people have been and always will be the foundation of change. That’s why United Way believes it is so critical to re-center democracy on citizens – because if our institutions – including nonprofits, private organizations, government, and others – operate

apart of the people in communities whose lives we care about, we will never see the results we all seek.”

Jean Silver-Isenstadt, National Physicians Alliance: “The National Physicians Alliance believes that civic engagement directly relates to health outcomes and health disparities, and that a healthy population will advance a stronger democracy.  As physicians motivated by social justice, we aim to change the culture of medicine into one that expects public advocacy from doctors and one that encourages community partnerships.  The social capital that accrues to the medical degree must be leveraged on behalf of patients.  This will require physicians to think beyond the individual exam room, develop new skills, and work in ready coalition with patients and partners to advance civic engagement for its own sake and for the health benefits that may follow.” 

Karen Kleinz, National School Public Relations Association: “Public education has always been at the core of our democracy because it was and is designed to serve all citizens – not just those with wealth, resources or power. But as our

Mike Wood

Jean Silver-Isenstadt

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public education system has grown and evolved, so has a disconnect between the schools, their communities and the citizens they serve. NSPRA believes that in order to have thriving, successful public schools, we must also have healthy, thriving communities, and this is achieved when there is a synergistic relationship that places the interests, expectations and aspirations of citizens at the center of community life. In order to recenter democracy, we must first reconnect all of the institutions and organizations that provide the operational framework for a community, move beyond ‘turf’ issues, and work collaboratively to reengage citizens in meaningful ways that allow them to envision and participate in creating communities that truly reflect their core values and desires.”

Ron Carlee, International City/County Management Association: “ICMA is the premier association of professional local government leaders. We seek to create excellence in

local governance by developing and fostering ethical professional managers. The first of our ‘core beliefs’ is ‘serving as stewards of representative democracy.’ This core belief is further reinforced by the first tenet of our Code of Ethics: Be dedicated to the concepts of effective and democratic local government by responsible elected officials and believe that professional general management is essential to the achievement of this objective. Tenet 2, in part, calls on members to maintain a “deep sense of social responsibility as a trusted public servant.” And, Tenet 4 recognizes that the ‘chief function of local government at all times is to serve the best interests of all people.’ Toward these ends ICMA provides an extensive array

of professional development and consultation to our members. We also conduct research and partner with other levels of government, professional associations, foundations, and the private sector.”

Ron Thomas, Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, on the American Planning Association: “One of the most fertile laboratories for exercising deliberative democracy has been planning projects and programs from the neighborhood to urban and regional scales. When practiced at its best, public planning activities can fulfill the promise of democracy to its citizens by engaging all sectors, all interests and all facets of the community in considering and committing to public, civic and private actions to achieve a better shared future. Moreover, federal, state and many local laws and regulations require varying levels of public input into planning activities. However, while listed everywhere as a planning imperative, the role of the public is often only vaguely defined. Amazingly, very few accredited planning curricula offer any courses in its theory, methods or practice. Most distressingly, many practitioners consider the public everything from an annoying diversion to a destructive impediment to successful planning.”

Karen Kleinz

Ron Carlee

Ron Thomas

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Matt Leighninger framed the meeting with a set of slides that describe the big picture of democratic evolution and innovation:

[Press CTRL and click on picture to view and hear podcast]

The “involvers” and the “involved”

Many of the “Recentering Democracy” participants represented the perspective of “involvers” who typically initiate and support public involvement efforts. These projects

– which are also described as “public engagement,” “deliberative democracy,” “democratic governance,” or “citizen participation” initiatives – have proliferated dramatically over the last fifteen years, as a response to the new challenges and opportunities in local governance. They reflect the belief that “The relationship between government, formal institutions, and citizens in community governance is changing dramatically,” as Mike Huggins put it. “The issue is to what extent you want to impact that.” When successful, these efforts engage large numbers of people in discussion, deliberation, and action planning.

Typically, these projects are focused on a particular issue or public problem, and are initiated by an organization, elected body, or agency devoted to addressing that issue: school administrators involving parents and other citizens in issues like redistricting or school finances; city councils or city managers involving residents in city budget deliberations; human relations commissions involving people in issues of race and diversity; planners involving residents in land use decisions; community organizers or YWCAs or neighborhood leaders or chapters of the League of Women Voters or local nonprofits involving people in other meetings on other topics.

The meeting participants compared notes on what they had discovered through this work. Gail Leftwich Kitch facilitated the discussion. It became clear that though they focused on different issue areas, they had learned many of the same lessons, and encountered many of the same challenges:

Mike Huggins

Gail Leftwich Kitch

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[double-click to view slides]

Overall, the “involvers” felt they had been successful in several ways: Recruiting large numbers, and a diverse array, of people (although there was

broad agreement that recruitment is particularly difficult and time-consuming work)

Producing an atmosphere of reasonable discussion, and building good will and trust among citizens, public officials, and public employees (due in large part to the use of good group process techniques)

Generating action ideas, informing public decisions, and bringing new problem-solving capacity to the table (though there were frustrations too with action and implementation; see below)

Questions of race, diversity, and equity prompted a great deal of discussion, with participants noting successes, challenges, and different ideas about how to move forward. There was shared commitment to the notion that race and equity must always be on the table (no matter the issue), and a recognition that involvement efforts must pay particular attention to recruiting “underrepresented” populations. Some meeting participants noted the continuing difficulty of reaching the “hard to reach,” and others noted the lack of diversity among decision-makers and public employees as an obvious barrier to better communication and collaboration. “Some of these experiments suffer from the same limitations as the old paradigm,” said Carolyn Farrow Garland. “The ones that are obvious to me are race, class, exclusion of young people. We have to be conscious of that in the way we structure them.”

There was some discussion of a strategic difference among the different strands of civic engagement: the “social justice” approach, which argues that underrepresented groups must be over-represented in public involvement efforts, and the “deliberative democracy” approach, which argues that involvement projects should strive to mirror the demographics of the broader community and aim to establish a relatively ‘level playing field’ within the discussions. (For a more thorough exploration of this question, see Creating Spaces for Change: Working Towards a ‘Story of Now’ in Civic Engagement.)

Carolyn Farrow Garland

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The meeting participants felt that public involvement, as currently practiced, has some limitations when it comes to producing tangible changes. Some people noted that the timing of involvement efforts doesn’t always match the timing of the policymaking cycle, so that citizen input can affect decision-makers at one point in the process and yet not be sustained adequately to influence a ‘final decision’ that may be made months, or years, afterward. Others pointed out that projects that are too focused on policy decisions are unlikely to ‘make everyone happy,’ and that they may cut short the potential of citizens and organizations to contribute their own time and energy to public problem-solving. But there were limitations too with these more diffuse, citizen-driven action efforts – they required too much capacity to monitor and support, and they were too difficult to sustain. So while the meeting participants were convinced that public involvement can, and often does, result in action and change, this belief came with a number of caveats and frustrations.

The greatest frustrations, however, seemed to focus on our collective inability to ‘embed’ public involvement strategies and principles more effectively in the way that institutions and communities function. Ultimately, “our purpose is to transform systems,” argued Everette Hill. Periodic efforts to engage people in key decisions may be laudable and productive, but some of the meeting participants wanted to make this work more accessible and helpful to people on an everyday basis. Ron Koehler, for example, said he wouldn’t be satisfied

until “every student in my district is engaged in a dialogue about the goals and direction of their own education.”

Some participants felt that the best way forward was simply to make current involvement efforts more common and easier to organize. In this view, episodic participation was sufficient; one participant wondered if expecting citizens to do more might mean “asking more of people than they can give.” Others felt we needed to go beyond the current practices of public involvement – and rather than asking citizens to participate in more involver-led initiatives, design projects and structures that meet citizen goals as well as those of local leaders. As Terry Amsler put it,

“we need to narrow the gap between the ‘involvers’ and the involved.’”

Democracy’s nagging little question: What do citizens want, anyway?

Having examined local democracy from the involvers’ point of view, the meeting participants then turned things around and began to focus on the citizens’ perspective. After all, it is hard to imagine how a community could sustain any system or pattern of public participation that does not meet the needs and goals of ordinary people. In their report on Sustaining Public Engagement, Archon Fung and Elena Fagotto argue that the best examples of sustained, embedded engagement are in communities with “a popular

Everette Hill

Ron Koehler

Terry Amsler

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constituency that is disposed to press for public deliberation and to defend its practice when such engagement becomes inconvenient to local elites and authorities.”

To provide one set of answers to the question of what people want, Katherine Loflin presented the latest findings from the Knight Foundations’ “Soul of the Community” study, a multi-year 26-community survey research project led by the Gallup Corporation. Soul of the Community has shown a positive correlation between citizens’ sense of attachment to their community and the economic growth of that community. And the main drivers of attachment seem to be:

Openness – The perception that the community is a “good place” for different kinds of people (the survey questions asked about several specific groups: older people, racial and ethnic minorities, families with kids, gays and lesbians, talented college graduates, and immigrants).

Social offerings – Respondents’ sense that their community had a “vibrant night life,” was a “good place to meet people,” and was a place where “people care about each other.”

Aesthetics – How people rate “the area’s parks, playgrounds and trails,” and how they rated its “overall beauty and physical setting.”

(For a closer look at the “Soul of the Community” results for all 26 of the communities surveyed, use the map below.)

One “Soul of the Community” finding that challenges traditional perceptions of democracy is that traditional civic measures, such as voter registration, volunteerism, and membership in local associations, do not correlate with community attachment. In other words, people who regularly vote, volunteer, and join groups are not more likely to feel a sense of belonging to their community –

and places with high scores for those civic measures are not more likely to have high levels of economic vitality. Or as Loflin put it, whether or not you are “engaged” may be more of a function of “who you are than where you live.”

Some of the meeting participants were optimistic that the type of public involvement work they support might have a greater effect on community attachment and economic growth. Others felt that current involvement is too temporary, episodic, and limited to have that kind of impact across an entire community. This question seemed to be a promising avenue for future research, either through “Soul of a Community” or other knowledge-building efforts.

Katherine Loflin

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From the ensuing conversation (facilitated by Carolyne Abdullah) about what citizens want, a number of key points emerged:

Community attachment is a “good thing” in its own right, both because it may be linked to economic growth and because we care about what people think of their communities – and yet public involvement leaders and practitioners usually don’t list it as one of the goals for their efforts, and seldom focus explicitly on trying to strengthen it.

“Place matters,” but residents’ relationship to place is more complicated than ever before. Some participants argued that online “places” were just as significant as physical ones. Others claimed that online technologies often reinforced citizens’ sense of attachment to physical place, pointing to examples such as the online neighborhood forums supported by e-democracy.org.

Some participants went even further in their analysis of how new technologies, could extend this work. Reporting on a recent meeting with experts in online engagement, Chris Gates said “embedded in the DNA of these tools are two principles: transparency and democracy. The problem is that everyone wants to use the tools, but they’re not comfortable with the DNA that comes along with them. As soon as you start using these tools, your organization has to become more transparent and small ‘d’ democratic. If you want to use these tools, you have to be comfortable with volunteers, taxpayers, etc., setting the priorities of the institution.”

The “need to meet people where they are,” no matter if that place is an online or physical space, is an essential principle in public involvement and a key direction for future innovation. “We were trying to reach out to younger people in our community, and we decided to do some outreach during happy hour at local bars,” reported Ron Carlee. “That was out of the box for a local government to do, but we connected with people we wouldn’t otherwise have connected with. Some of those people have since been engaged in a wide variety of things that they never would’ve been involved in – but if we hadn’t been willing to go to the bar at happy hour, we never would’ve had the conversation.”

Providing young people with “prominent roles in authentic public engagement” is also an essential ingredient for current best practices and future innovations.

Giving people social and cultural reasons to take part, as well as the political incentives of solving problems and making decisions, is a promising pathway for experimentation – and one that reflected both the lessons learned from involvement efforts and the findings of “Soul of the Community.” “Sometimes you need a party rather than a meeting,” said Gloria Rubio-Cortes. “And sometimes you need a combination of a party and a meeting.”

The power of public institutions to provide people with a sense of legitimacy is critical. “People get activated by hope,” Jeri Williams argued, and that hope often

Carolyne Abdullah

Chris Gates

Gloria Rubio-Cortes

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springs from the sense that “public officials and employees seem willing to listen.”

Despite this last point about public institutions, there was also some recognition that local governments and school systems were only part of the picture. The mission of recentering democracy seems to be a cross-sector, collaborative endeavor, requiring the leadership and support of a wide variety of organizations (and citizens themselves). “What do we need to do to build capacity for ‘institutional ad hoc-ism?’” wondered John Dedrick.

The state of the (disconnected) art: Many kitchens and ingredients, not enough chefs

The “Recentering Democracy” participants also recognized the importance of local factors, and realized that each community might have its own unique sense of whether and how to recenter democracy. “Every community has a complex civic ecology,” said one participant. “There are many civic models and systems, and they differ according to communities and problems.” But there was a strong sense that this kind of thinking and planning was not going on in many places. “How do we catalyze civic planning in these different contexts?”

Cataloguing “civic ingredients” seemed critical to this kind of local civic planning. Having discussed the principles and strategies emerging from successful public involvement efforts, the group turned to other civic ingredients. Some of the participants brought with them special expertise with one of those potential assets, such as neighborhood councils, civic grantmaking, local online forums, public libraries, and youth engagement. They described the lessons they had learned about these ingredients in a poster session; the following slides capture their key points:

[double-click to view slides] While the meeting participants felt this discussion of civic ingredients was interesting and exciting – it reminded us of what Carmen Sirianni called the “civic abundance” that democracy reformers have to build upon – it was difficult to talk about how those

Jeri Williams

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ingredients could be assembled into new recipes for local democracy. This would have to be a local discussion, the participants felt; communities needed to take stock of the assets they already had, consider ones they might add, and think through how they might use these ingredients in concert.

To the extent that the meeting participants outlined a direction for communities to follow in this planning, they seemed to embrace a number of ‘middle paths.’ For example, Joe Peters argued that “The neighborhood thinks they know best – City Hall thinks they know best – we need spaces in between where everyone knows better.” Others pointed out the need to think ‘in between’ a purely online approach to politics and one that considered only face-to-face meetings. Terry Amsler’s point about bridging the gap between ‘involvers’ and involved, and Gloria Rubio-Cortes’ quest

for a ‘meeting that is also a party’ also fit into this category.

Action themes

Towards the end of the meeting, the participants compiled a list of ten action themes: 1. Connect the national associations – Create more opportunities for discussion and

collaboration on issues of democracy between the national associations that represent and convene local leaders

2. Support work in 5-10 communities – Convene discussions in 5-10 communities, involving a broad range of leaders, that will, at the least, improve engagement practices and, potentially, catalyze the development of comprehensive citizen-centered democracy strategies

3. Civic skills and connections for all – Develop model training programs that can be implemented in communities, providing civic skills (recruitment, facilitation, issue framing, action planning, others?) for citizens, public employees, youth leaders, and leaders in ways that build connections between people in these different sectors

4. Develop better language – Find better ways of telling the story of local democratic innovation…could be simplifying the message…could be telling a longer story that incorporates the critical lessons…but above all, gets us away from the fuzzy, dreary civic synonyms (engagement, involvement, participation, etc.)

5. Better official meetings – Develop new formats for public meetings (official public hearings, meetings of school boards, city councils, zoning boards, etc.) that reflect proven engagement principles, are supported by an ‘enabling’ legal framework, and utilize online technologies as well as face-to-face techniques

6. Change the pre-professional programs – Strengthen (or in many cases, introduce) the teaching of democratic principles and strategies within the graduate programs (public administration, planning, etc.) that produce public managers

7. Help develop “Participation 3.0” – Develop a sequence, or menu, of engagement strategies that fully integrate online and face-to-face tools and techniques

Carmen Sirianni

Joe Peters

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8. Develop a political analysis of this work – Describe how the growth of small ‘p’ political engagement is coming up against the big ‘P’ Politics of partisanship, and develop an analysis that helps communities and leaders deal with these tensions

9. Understand the necessary cultural shifts within institutions – Describe the cultural shifts that need to take place within various kinds of local groups and institutions in order to facilitate and support democratic work

10. Influence the federal advocacy agenda of the national associations – Develop a set of recommendations about how federal policy can support local democracy, and encourage the lobbyists for the national associations to advocate for them in a concerted way

On the final morning, the participants discussed those themes and used a ‘dotmocracy’ process to rank them. This yielded five priorities.

Five priorities for recentering democracy around citizens

We, the participants in the “Recentering Democracy” meeting, found that we shared many of the same ideas and assumptions about the future of local democracy. We used terms like power, privilege, place, community, reciprocity, and infrastructure. We agreed that communities need to close the gaps, or even blur the lines, between the “involvers” and the “involved.” We felt that online tools would become increasingly important, but that neighborhoods and other geographic ties would continue to matter. We embraced the notion that questions of race, diversity, and equity must be explicitly named and brought to the center of the discussion. We recognized that the shifts already occurring in local politics, and many of the additional changes we seek, will require corresponding shifts in our public institutions. Finally, we united around the belief that “What do citizens really care about?” is a touchstone question that can inform current involvement practices and guide our thinking about future innovations.

We were also impatient to move from abstract visions to concrete actions. The development of public involvement has been driven by local leaders reacting to pressing needs and conditions; we resolved to continue this tradition of practical innovation. The group generated ten potential priorities, and voted these five to the top of the list:

1. Connect the national associations

The “Recentering Democracy” participants included members and staffers from some of the main associations representing and convening local leaders. These associations have encouraged, informed, and supported their members in their public involvement work, but they have rarely worked together on these issues. We agreed on the need for more discussion and collaboration between them.

Some of the specific ideas included: Convening informal conversations among the associational representatives that

were present at Cantigny, starting with the groups that are based in DC and can come together face-to-face most easily.

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Developing ways to share materials across associations online. Identifying other associations that are engaged in this work. Developing a one-stop easy-access point for sharing information and materials. Offering webinars that allow members of different associations to learn from one

another. Evaluating ways to use the Knight/Gallup “Soul of the Community” findings. Connecting across associations at the local level – finding places where active

members of different associations can begin working together on democracy issues.

2. Support innovative work in 5-10 communities

By connecting local leaders and supporting local innovation, the “Recentering Democracy” participants felt that we could help catalyze a number of pilot projects. These efforts would help us understand how to combine various civic ingredients, give us new examples of how local democracy can operate, and keep us focused on the central question of what citizens want out of governance and community.

There were a number of suggestions for how to identify these communities, ranging from a high-profile application program to working more quietly through national associations and foundations. We agreed that the “Soul of the Community” research would be instrumental in illustrating the larger potential of engagement. We also agreed that any support we provide would have to be interactive rather than prescriptive. “We cannot go in telling people what they are going to be doing,” as one participant put it. “True engagement is listening.”

3. Civic skills and connections for all

As part of the work with 5-10 communities, and as a valuable activity in its own right, the “Recentering Democracy” participants agreed on the need to develop model training programs that can be implemented in communities. We recognized that there are a number of existing training programs, and many case studies and tools, but there is no mechanism to quickly sort through them and determine what is needed.

Some of the specific ideas included: Offering introductory training using case studies and different models. Developing a toolkit that collects the existing tools. Offering coaching, mentoring, and ongoing support for people doing this work. Focusing on libraries and other local institutions that can serve as hubs for these

resources. Supporting the development of Participedia, an online resource that includes case

studies, tools, and organizational resources.

4. Strengthen the pre-professional programs

A few acknowledgements

The McCormick Foundation supported this meeting and discussion in several critical ways. Their Cantigny Center is a splendid physical facility for discussion and planning. John Sirek’s warmth, civic engagement experience, and passion for moving from ideas to action set an example for others to follow. Janice Belzowski masterminded all of the many logistical details that would have otherwise made it impossible for me to focus on the content of the meeting. Carolyne Abdullah, Gail Leftwitch Kitch, Gloria Rubio-Cortes, Taylor Willingham, Chris Gates, and John Esterle all helped with facilitation and design questions, including many adjustments in the course of the meeting. Taylor Willingham’s notes were invaluable in compiling this report.

– Matt Leighninger

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The “Recentering Democracy” participants felt that the pre-professional programs that prepare students for roles in local democracy were not yet providing the skills and ideas graduates need to excel in these jobs. Programs in public administration, public policy, planning, social work, educational administration, and other disciplines must strengthen (or in many cases, introduce) the teaching of democratic principles and strategies. In many cases, this represents a major paradigm shift for the systems that are in place.

Some of the specific ideas included: Surveying the “consumers” who hire these graduates, and determine what they

need in the field. (Use the model of the survey of higher education done by the American Medical Student Association that evaluated and graded universities.)

Identify innovative existing syllabi, and develop new model curricula and syllabi that are shared with schools of public administrations.

Open the lines of communication between the accreditation institutions.

Determine opportunities for professional development within professional associations.

5. Understand the necessary cultural shifts within institutions

Recentering local democracy will require significant cultural shifts within public institutions. “When we started out, we thought this initiative was simply a way to interact differently with citizens,” says Mark Linder, former assistant city manager in San Jose, California, and an architect of that city’s Strong Neighborhoods Initiative. “We found out that in order to do it well, we had to change how City Hall functioned.”

The main action idea that emerged under this heading was a report that would describe and explore 5-10 examples of situations where institutional changes are occurring. The report would be framed in a way that speaks directly to people engaged in change. It would also highlight the work of thinkers and practitioners who are championing cultural change within institutions.